Our Pocket Garden design is a miniature model of what we are creating in our new larger Eco-Garden, with elements to support different topics. Lots of what we have been learning about has focused on topics that all support each other and have many common elements, including how our actions can engineer water flow,  well-being, and even the climate.  We have created a biodiversity Pocket Garden.

For example;
Climate Change - We have been thinking about using less resources. We did a scientific investigation to save rainwater for watering and to find the most effective way for it to travel to the plants.
Health topic- We have included herbs like mint and chives to smell and eat, also strawberries and tomatoes.
Biodiversity topic- We repurposed milk cartons to create bird feeders and built bird homes out of old wood. We included pebbles and water for minibeasts, and different flowers for the bees and bugs.

Everyone enjoyed making a Pocket Garden and we all had our own personal favourite bits, but we all agreed that seeing it all come together at the end was exciting and it made us feel successful and proud!

Our learning at the National Park has helped us to look carefully and appreciate places without loud noises. We have created a quiet ECO garden to go and sit in and observe the creatures visiting and creating a space to help nature and our Pocket Garden will be placed within this garden near the entrance to our school.

We collected and made things that would support biodiversity through creating habitats to encourage lots of creatures into our garden.

What did we do to make our pocket Garden?
o We collected cones, leaves, sticks and things from the forest floor and filled recycled plant pots to create mini-bug hotels and we used old wellies for our Pocket Garden.
o We made bird feeders using empty milk cartons.
o We worked with a partner to make bird nesting boxes.
o Robbie(p6) researched and told us that bees see yellow and blues and greens before any other colours, so Sophie(P7) painted our pallets without help.
o Our art teacher thought our Pocket Garden was a great idea, so we made insects using recycled materials, painted pebbles donated from another community garden, and we enjoyed some other art activities such as our bee collage pictures. We also decorated our donated food tins which we used as our plant pots. We collected the recycled tins from another school.
o When we were exploring our school grounds, we found a robin’s nest with baby robins in it and we knew to leave it alone but when the birds left the nest, we saved it and put it into our Pocket Garden for other creatures to reuse.

Making our garden has been an extremely rewarding journey but we did experience challenges such as not having anywhere to grow flowers and food. Our new Garden for Growing, which is a fenced area with a polycrub within, was not constructed till later than anticipated (May) thus we missed getting our seeds in! However, we really appreciate the donated plants from our community friends at ‘Fortune Works’ and our school families.

We are now ready to start planting in our new garden! Hopefully, some carrots will be ready for our ‘One Planet Picnic’ planned for September to celebrate our new gardens.